Reads an official Opera Max company blog post, “Opera Max also saves your data on music apps like Pandora, Slacker Radio and YouTube Music, to name a few. But, this is just the start as we will be bringing even more data savings to more apps over the next few months.”

I just upgraded my data plan from 2 to 3 GB for free, thanks to Verizon, and that bought me more time, but I’m still very low on bandwidth and it’s being shared between my phone and my parents’ tablet. For whatever reason, the 2GB that I did have doesn’t seem to be enough. Of course, I’ve been streaming a lot of music, and I think that might be the cause. Needless to say, I’m really considering giving Opera Max a test drive.

Whenever someone updates something, people rush otu to get it. if they improve Android or iOS, servers have to suffer with the load of millions of people trying to upgrade. However, people aren’t as quick to update their computer operating systems. I’m not sure why that is; it’s upgrading software, and any errors can be fixed pretty easily. Still, I don’t rush out to upgrade my phone and people aren’t rushing out to download the newest version of Windows. Windows 10 isn’t taking off like expected.

Indeed, Windows 7 is still the most popular operating system on the planet, followed by Windows XP and Windows 8. Windows 10 has picked up a little bit, growing slightly, but it seems that people aren’t picking it up even though it’s free. Granted, if they’re anything like me, they won’t upgrade until after the first update series fixes a lot of the bugs. With a big upgrade coming soon, I’d imagine that you’d see more people adopting Windows 10. Not me, though. I like the way my computer functions, and if I miss out on the upgraded software, I’ll be able to pick it up when I upgrade my laptop.

I’m a very, very late convert to smartphones, but I love having that power in the palm of my hand. What I don’t like is when I’m trying to read something or browse a site and I accidentally hit an advertisement while trying to scroll down on a page. It’s the worst, it’s disruptive, and I feel like every misplaced finger is going to completely ruin my phone. Not sure why I feel like that, but there you go. Thankfully, after months of looking for a solution, a solution has been given to me. Adblock Plus now has a web browser.

That’s phenomenal. Working off of the Firefox/Mozilla base, Adblock Plus’s developers have launched an ad-blocking browser for Apple and Android. That’s pretty great, and they’re beating Apple to the punch by a few days on the ad-blocking browser front. I haven’t tried the browser out yet, but I’m going to get there and I know it’s going to be awesome. It’s not as good as having an installed ad blocker for Chrome on my phone, but at this point I’ll gladly change browsers to give myself a little freedom of scrolling.

With every new operating system comes a round of computer upgrades. That’s just how it works. Rather than trying to upgrade computers with new pieces, most people just end up buying a new computer and calling it a day. For the price of some new parts and Windows 10, you’re probably better off going with that anyway, getting something tested and proven to be functional. Yeah, about that testing… When Windows 10 hits markets on July 29, there won’t be many/any Windows 10 computers to buy.

The issue is the testing window. Microsoft still hasn’t released a version of Win 10 to PC makers to test their software and hardware on, because Microsoft is still flattening bugs. That means that PC companies can’t release their products because they’re still not sure what’s going to work and how, and the time to do that testing is getting shorter and shorter with each passing day. However, Microsoft promises to fix the problem before it becomes a problem.

“A build of Windows 10 will be delivered to our OEM partners soon so they can start imaging new devices with Windows 10,” wrote a Microsoft spokeswoman to PC World. “We expect several OEM partners to have Windows 10 devices available for sale on July 29, including Lenovo, HP, Dell, and Acer with many, many more devices to follow in the coming weeks and months. We are excited to be working with our OEM partners to see Windows 10 innovations light up on these new devices.”

“This is great for customers and for mobile payments and we’re looking forward to working with Google to help more customers experience the benefits of tap to pay on their Verizon Wireless smartphone,” reads an email from a Verizon spokesperson.

Google Wallet, like Apple Pay, is basically a third party payment manager. Instead of carrying around cards, you enter the information into your payment app of choice and use it to check out online or at places where NFC scanners are available (assuming you have an NFC-enabled smartphone). Of course, just because you have it that doesn’t mean you will use it, but increased exposure makes it more likely to be adopted by the consumer at large.

It’s a wild world out there, and it seems that the addition of technology is only making the job more difficult for parents. Everywhere I go, I see little kids with tablets, on phones, or with some sort of electronic device streaming entertainment into their faces so that the parents can get a little breather and the kids can get a little entertainment at the grocery store (or wherever). Fortunately, media companies are working hard to make sure that your child’s screen time won’t be unsupervised. A few years ago, Netflix launched a kid-friendly version to filter out the stuff inappropriate for little eyes, and now it looks like another company is joining them. YouTube has launched a kid-friendly app to keep children from being exposed to the darker side of the Internet.

In addition to helping cut down on salacious content, the kid-safe app will also help keep little ones safe from their own inappropriate searches. Doubling down on the parental support, the app will also have built-in timers to allow parents to decide just how much time little ones can spend on YouTube. There will be some ads, but they are promised to be as kid-friendly as the content.

I bet you thought it was gone, didn’t you? Once upon a time, when people need computers to chat with one another over long distances, there were a host of chatting options: AOL/AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and the least-heralded of the three, MSN Messenger. AIM is still around, and I think Yahoo Messenger probably is too, but MSN Messenger has long since disappeared in the United States, supplanted by Microsoft’s purchase of Skype. However, while MSN may be gone in the US, it still has a home in China, where Messgenger lived on for years after its unceremonious dumping Stateside.

That’s all changing. Facing competition from Skype and Chinese-developed QQ chat service from Tencent, Microsoft is reading the writing on the wall and powering down the servers. MSN Messenger will be signing off for good in October. Talk about the end of an era. I think anyone in their late 20s or early 30s remembers spending hours online chatting via various things, struggling to play games via dial-up modem, and other things that s0und like my grandmother talking about the radio, or my parents talking about black-and-white TV.

Wherever you go online, there’s a glut of celebrity news coverage that may or may not be of interest to you. If you’re like me, it’s all either interesting or easily ignored, but some people are a little more… ahem, intense in their dislike of celebrities. Say you hate the Kardashians, or Lady Gaga, or whoever else. Best avoid every website ever then? Not so fast my friend. Meet the greatest Google Chrome extension ever: Silence of the Celebs.

Silence of the Celebs (developed by Gesture Theory) is an extension for Google Chrome’s web browser that removes celebrity results from a multitude of popular websites, including Twitter, The New York Times, CNN, Huffington Post, Google News, Gawker, Mashable, and TMZ. Amazingly enough, the Twitter blocks occur in real time, so if you’re sick to death of hearing about Rebecca Black, you can ban her from your Twitter timeline posthaste and free yourself from Friday-related news.

If this extension works half as well as it promises, this is going to be one of the most popular things ever released for Google Chrome.